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3085.611513
In 1992, Bengt Hägglund (1920–2015) published an article in which he describes a certain codex and ascribes its authorship to Johannes Rudbeckius (1581–1646), who was professor of loci theologici at Uppsala University during the years 1611–1613 The codex has Matthias Hafenreffer’s (1561–1619) Loci as an explicit point of reference Hägglund takes the manuscript to be a transcript of material that Rudbeckius would have authored and used for delivering lectures on dogmatics, but maintains that the manuscript itself was written by others – either by copying a written original or by taking notes of an oral presentation In the following account, I will denote by “C” the codex Hägglund had in his possession, by “W” the work of which C would be a transcript, and by
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73206.611761
Most philosophers accept Necessity of Actuality: whenever ‘actually ’ is true, it is true with metaphysical necessity. The logic that results from rejecting this principle has recently been studied by Glazier and Krämer (2024); the present paper develops its philosophical foundations. Although Necessity of Actuality may seem to be required by actuality’s role in comparing what is with what might have been, I argue that the principle is false and that such comparisons are in good standing even without the principle. The rejection of Necessity of Actuality reopens the following question: for which ? is ‘actually ’ metaphysically possible? I propose an answer that appeals to the idea that actuality has an essence, and I explore some hypotheses about what this essence might be.
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79941.611777
This is the summer break and I’m publishing old essays written when the audience of this newsletter was confidential. This post has been originally published April 5, 2022. In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the suggestion made by the philosopher Paul Weithman about a possible Rawlsian account of the populist vote. …
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219751.611787
This paper will investigate justice requirements that a pluralist stance on concepts of mental disorder should meet for use on a global scale. This is important given that different concepts of mental disorder are connected to particular interventions which may be more or less successful in specific contexts. While taking a broadly normative view on mental disorders, I will describe relevant concepts in a more fine grained manner, referring to their connections to particular approaches to biology, the self, or community. Drawing on research on epistemic injustice, I highlight the requirement that the set of multiple concepts be sufficiently flexible to enable the participation of those possessing relevant local knowledge. Using insights from health justice, I point out that the set of concepts should be conducive to distributive and procedural justice with regard to mental health and should support interventions on social determinants of health. These requirements apply to two dimensions of pluralism: regarding what concepts to include and how to relate them to one another. I conclude by explaining how an ontology of partial overlaps connected to a concept of health as metaphysically social can help address the challenges arising particularly regarding the latter dimension.
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219793.611793
A recent dispute in political science raises issues about the objectivity of measures of democracy. Political scientists Little and Meng argue that democracy indices using country experts as coders show a greater degree of democratic backsliding than measures that are objective. They worry that this discrepancy may reflect coder bias. I distinguish three aspects of objectivity and offer a reconceptualization of objectivity as coherence objectivity. I argue that coherence objectivity is better suited for evaluating measures of social science concepts like democracy than the understanding of objectivity implicit in Little and Meng’s discussion.
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292062.611799
According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. More formally: (PAP) necessarily, for any person S and any action A, S is morally responsible for performing A only if there is some action A* such that S could have done A* while failing to do A.
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393484.611812
Super-Humeans (Esfeld & Deckert, 2017) argue that the most parsimonious ontology of the natural world compatible with our best physical theories consists exclusively of particles and the distance relations between them. This paper argues by contrast that Super-Humean reduction goes insufficiently far, by showing there to be a more parsimonious ontology compatible with physics: Ultimate-Humeanism. This novel view posits an ontology consisting solely of the particles and distance relations required for the existence of a single brain. Super-Humeans impose conditions on what counts as an ontology of the natural world to avoid their view slipping into this kind of ontology, but these conditions are arbitrarily imposed and once this is exposed, Super-Humeans face a dilemma. Either they can embrace Ultimate-Humeanism as the minimal ontology of the natural world compatible with physics, or (more likely) they can rethink the methodology that got them there. Overall, this paper argues that Super-Humeanism currently lacks principled motivation, outlines a framework for naturalistic ontological reductions, and exposes the consequences of unchecked adherence to a simplicity-driven methodology.
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393547.611819
In this chapter I review Kuhn’s account of discovery. Kuhn held that a scientific discovery requires both a discovery that an object exists and a discovery what that object is. Accordingly, Kuhn held that there are two kinds of discovery, which may be referred to what-that discovery and that-what discovery. The latter are Kuhn’s focus in SSR but considering both kinds of discovery allow for a fuller understanding of Kuhn’s view. Interestingly, Kuhn implied that one needs a correct conception of what one discovers, even though he failed to say how correct that conception needs to be. I propose a solution to this problem.
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533597.611825
In grand ceremony King Lear parcels out his kingdom, intending afterwards to retire, and “unburdened crawl toward death.” But who shall get what? For this he runs a royal bonus round, and the contestants, his daughters, must answer, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” After insincere speeches from Goneril and Regan, Cordelia, his favorite, won’t play—“I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.” Furious, Lear disowns her: “I disclaim all my parental care...and as a stranger to my heart and me hold thee from this forever.” Soon the elder sisters, newly-empowered, strip Lear of his armed attendants and his dignity, in a delicious Shakespearean phrase:
Be then desired By her that else will take the thing she begs, A little to diquantity your train,
and Lear is left out in a storm, helpless, in the company of fools and madness. …
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566535.611831
Species lists play an important role in biology and practical domains like conservation, legislation, biosecurity and trade regulation. However, their effective use by non-specialist scientific and societal users is sometimes hindered by disagreements between competing lists. While it is well-known that such disagreements exist, it remains unclear how prevalent they are, what their nature is, and what causes them. In this study, we argue that these questions should be investigated using methods based on taxon concept rather than methods based on Linnaean names, and use such a concept-based method to quantify disagreement about bird classification and investigate its relation to research effort. We found that there was disagreement about 38% of all groups of birds recognized as a species, more than three times as much as indicated by previous measures. Disagreement about the delimitation of bird groups was the most common kind of conflict, outnumbering disagreement about nomenclature and disagreement about rank. While high levels of conflict about rank were associated with lower levels of research effort, this was not the case for conflict about the delimitation of bird groups. This suggests that taxonomic disagreement cannot be resolved simply by increasing research effort.
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611410.611836
I led a session of a workshop, recently, on how to write a “trade book” in philosophy. I don’t love the phrase “trade book,” which I’ve put in protective scare-quotes. And I feel some discomfort, too, in being cast as an authority. …
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692651.611842
We spend much of our adult lives thinking and reminiscing about particular events of the past, which, by their very nature, can never be repeated. What is involved in a capacity to think thoughts of this kind? In this paper, I propose that such thoughts are essentially connected with a capacity to communicate about past events, and specifically in the special way in which events of the past are valued and shared in our relationships with one another. I motivate this proposal by way of the claim that such thoughts are practically useless: there are no practical, forward-looking tasks that require information which is specific to particular past events. Thus I suggest that thoughts of this specific kind have a home only in the cognitive economy of a creature who finds past events to be of interest for their own sake, and that this interest in the past is a peculiar feature of human social life.
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692675.61185
For several decades, intercultural philosophers have produced an extensive body of scholarly work aimed at mutual intercultural understanding. They have focused on the ideal of intercultural dialogue that is supported by dialogue principles and virtuous attitudes. However, this ideal is challenged by decolonial scholarship as one which neglects power inequalities. Decolonial scholars have emphasized the differences between cultures and worldviews, shifting the focus to colonial history and radical alterity. In return, intercultural philosophers have worried about the very possibility of dialogue and mutual understanding in frameworks that use coloniality as their singular pole of analysis. In this paper, we explore the complex relations between decolonial
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692700.61186
Past philosophical analyses of bullshit have generally presented bullshit as a formidable threat to truth. However, most of these analyses also reduce bullshit to a mere symptom of a greater evil (e.g. indifference towards truth). In this paper, I introduce a new account of bullshit which, I argue, is more suited to understand the threat posed by bullshit. I begin by introducing a few examples of “truth-tracking bullshit”, before arguing that these examples cannot be accommodated by past, process-based accounts of bullshit. I then introduce my new, output-based account of bullshit, according to which a claim is bullshit when it is presented as or appears as interesting at first sight but is revealed not to be that interesting under closer scrutiny. I present several arguments in favor of this account, then argue that it is more promising than past accounts when it comes to explaining how bullshit spreads and why it is a serious threat to truth.
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692879.611866
In this paper I aim to undermine Stoic and Neo-Stoic readings of Benedict de Spinoza by examining the latter’s strong agreements with Epicurus (a notable opponent of the Stoics) on the nature and ethical role of pleasure in living a happy life. Ultimately, I show that Spinoza and Epicurus are committed to three central claims which the Stoics reject: (1) pleasure holds a necessary connection to healthy natural being, (2) pleasure manifests healthy being through positive changes in state and states of healthy being per se, and (3) pleasure is by nature good. The Stoics reject these three claims due to their views on pleasant sensations as preferred moral indifferents and passionate pleasures as diseases of the soul, views which Spinoza (due to the above-mentioned commitments) is strongly opposed to, thereby placing him (at least on the subject of pleasure) outside the realm of merely following or improving on Stoic doctrines. From this comparative analysis we also gain deeper insight into both Spinoza’s engagement with ancient Greek philosophy and the value of Epicureanism and Spinozism in helping us achieve and maintain happiness in the present day, particularly with respect to the benefits and harms of bodily and mental pleasures.
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742610.611872
It is an honor to have been asked to contribute a paper to a Festschrift for John Martin Fischer and it is a pleasure to do so. A paper to be included in a volume honoring a scholar need not, speaking strictly, address that scholar’s work, but I would not dream of contributing an essay to a book honoring John that was not about his work. That resolution, however, confronts me with a problem, for the only things worth anyone’s attention that I have to say about John’s contributions to philosophy pertain to his well-known and influential work on the relation (or lack thereof) between determinism and moral responsibility, and those things I have already said —and said as well as I shall ever be able to. The only solution to this problem seems to me to be to reply to one of John’s criticisms of my own work—which carries the danger of my own work, rather than John’s, becoming the topic of this chapter. My only excuse for risking this unseemly outcome is that when I tried to think of a topic for the essay that addressed John’s work and about which I had something to say that I had not already said, only this came to mind.
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912573.611877
Hardy’s ψ-ontology theorem proves the reality of the wave function under the assumption of restricted ontic indifference. It has been conjectured that restricted ontic indifference, which is a very strong assumption from the ψ-epistemic view, can be derived from two weaker sub-assumptions: an ontic state assumption and a locality assumption. However, Leifer argued that this derivation cannot go through when considering the existence of the vacuum state in the second-quantized description of quantum states. In this paper, I present a new analysis of Hardy’s theorem. First, I argue that the ontic state assumption is valid in the second-quantized description of quantum states. Second, I argue that the locality assumption is a locality assumption for product states and it is weaker than the preparation independence assumption of the PBR theorem. Third, I argue that Leifer’s objection to the derivation of restricted ontic indifference is invalid. Finally, I argue that although the vacuum state is irrelevant, the existence of the tails of the wave function will block the derivation of restricted ontic indifference from the ontic state assumption and the locality assumption.
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912593.611883
This paper designs and defends a conceptual framework for the disambiguation of scientific language regarding open and closed systems. We argue that the open-closed distinction should always be precisifed by specifying a characteristic quantity that is conserved if and only if the system is closed. Open systems are those for which conservation of the characteristic quantity fails. This precisification is in accord with much but not all existing practice. We show that an open system can have well-posed autonomous dynamics and need not be embeddable in any larger system. We distinguish two kinds of autonomy and show that they dissociate from the open-closed distinction. We argue that this framework clears the path towards a new approach to the modelling of autonomous open systems in quantum physics and cosmology.
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912611.611889
In a recent paper (Found Phys 54:14, 2024), Carcassi, Oldofredi and Aidala concluded that the ψ-ontic models defined by Harrigan and Spekkens cannot be consistent with quantum mechanics, since the information entropy of a mixture of non-orthogonal states are different in these two theories according to their information theoretic analysis. In this paper, I argue that this no-go theorem for ψ-ontic models is false by explaining the physical origin of the von Neumann entropy in quantum mechanics.
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1262624.611895
Imagination is often celebrated for its freedom. Hume, for example, famously claimed that nothing is more free than human imagination. Yet as expansive as imagination might be, its freedom is not entirely without bounds. In fact, even in the course of celebrating the freedom of imagination, Hume himself pointed to one limit: imagination “cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses” (Hume 1748/1977: 31). On Hume’s view, the freedom of imagination consists in its “unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing” the ideas of the senses (Hume 1748/1977: 31). But even if Hume is right that imagination operates without limits on the material with which it is provided, when that material itself is impoverished, then so too is imagination.
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1431518.611903
This correspondence marks the return of physicists Richard C. Tolman and Percy W. Bridgman to the topic of dimensional analysis. In the preceding decades Tolman and Bridgman were at the center of debates concerning the methodological and metaphysical commitments of dimensional reasoning, beginning with Tolman’s controversial proposal that a “principle of similitude”—a principle asserting that global scale transformations of length quantities are dynamical and empirical symmetries—ought to be the foundational principle of dimensional analysis. Bridgman, inspired to clear up the mass of confusion he saw in the ensuing debate, wrote the first book in English on the topic: Dimensional Analysis (originally published 1922, with a revised edition published in 1931), which coined what is now the standard name for the method. This correspondence has yet to have been published or referred to in the literature on dimensional analysis and its history. With its publication I include this editorial introduction and some exegetical and contextualizing notes. This correspondence is not only significant because it clarifies some of the—largely metaphysical—issues left unsettled by the original debate between Tolman, Bridgman, and others, but it also highlights the practical significance of these issues for physicists in the early 20th century who were working to standardize the unit system used in the teaching and practices of physics and engineering—especially with respect to electromagnetic units. A Richard Chace Tolman (1881-1948) was Professor of Physical Chemistry and Mathematical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Besides being one of the central figures in debates regarding the foundations of dimensional analysis, he was one of the first disseminators of relativity theory in the United States and served as a scientific advisor for the Manhattan Project. Tolman in fact first suggested the implosion method that used in the “Fat Man” bomb on Nagasaki (Monk 2014, 364).
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1431541.611914
I argue that dimensional analysis provides an answer to a skeptical challenge to the theory of model mediated measurement. The problem arises when considering the task of calibrating a novel measurement procedure, with greater range, to the results of a prior measurement procedure. The skeptical worry is that the agreement of the novel and prior measurement procedures in their shared range may only be apparent due to the emergence of systematic error in the exclusive range of the novel measurement procedure. Alternatively: what if the two measurement procedures are not in fact measuring the same quantity? The theory of model mediated measurement can only say that we assume that there is a common quantity. In contrast, I show that the satisfaction of dimensional homogeneity across the metrological extension is independent evidence for the so-called assumption. This is illustrated by the use of dimensional analysis in high pressure experiments. This results in an extension of the theory of model mediated measurement, in which a common quantity in metrological extension is no longer assumed, but hypothesized.
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1431568.61192
This paper recovers an important, century-old debate regarding the methodological and metaphysical foundations of dimensional analysis. Consideration of Richard Tolman’s failed attempt to install the principle of similitude—the relativity of size—as the founding principle of dimensional analysis both clarifies the method of dimensional analysis and articulates two metaphysical positions regarding quantity dimensions. Tolman’s position is quantity dimension fundamentalism. This is a commitment to dimensional realism and a set of fundamental dimensions which ground all further dimensions. The opposing position, developed primarily by Bridgman, is quantity dimension conventionalism. Conventionalism is an anti-realism regarding dimensional structure, holding our non-representational dimensional systems have basic quantity dimensions fixed only by convention. This metaphysical dispute was left somewhat unsettled. It is shown here that both of these positions face serious problems: fundamentalists are committed to surplus dimensional structure; conventionalists cannot account for empirical constraints on our dimensional systems nor the empirical success of dimensional analysis. It is shown that an alternative position is available which saves what is right in both: quantity dimension functionalism.
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1604521.611926
Different species of realism have been proposed in the scientific and philosophical literature. Two of these species are direct realism and causal pattern realism. Direct realism is a form of perceptual realism proposed by ecological psychologists within cognitive science. Causal pattern realism has been proposed within the philosophy of model-based science. Both species are able to accommodate some of the main tenets and motivations of instrumentalism. The main aim of this paper is to explore the conceptual moves that make both direct realism and causal pattern realism tenable realist positions able to accommodate an instrumentalist stance. Such conceptual moves are (i) the rejection of veritism and (ii) the re-structuring of the phenomena of interest. We will then show that these conceptual moves are instances of the ones of a common realist genus we name pragmatist realism.
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1616718.611933
Since French President Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of the Assemblée nationale (the French lower parliamentary chamber) in the wake of the large victory of the far-right in the European elections, a large majority of the French people have been living in anguish. …
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1664280.611939
Alongside Madhyamaka, Yogācāra is one of the two major
philosophical traditions of Mahāyāna Buddhism that
originated in India. The philosophical and soteriological ideas set
forth in the Yogācāra works had a great impact on the
development of Buddhist thought not only in the Indian subcontinent
but also in other parts of Asia, especially in China, Japan and Tibet. Besides its highly influential exposition of the stages of the
Mahāyāna path to liberation, the tradition developed several
emblematic philosophical doctrines, such as the mind-only
(cittamātra) teaching, the theory of three natures
(trisvabhāva), and the eightfold classification of
consciousness, including the introduction of the so-called defiled
mind (kliṣṭamanas) and the substratum or store
consciousness (ālayavijñāna).
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1706428.611944
While Elizabeth Spelke’s book What Babies Know provides powerful support for concept nativism, her focus on understanding concept nativism through six innate core knowledge systems is too confining. There is also no reason to suppose that what she calls the curse of a compositional mind constitutes a principled reason for positing less innate structure in explaining the origins of concepts. Any solution to such problems must take into account poverty of the stimulus considerations, which argue for postulating more innate structure, not less.
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1719859.61195
It should seem obvious that any purportedly comprehensive account of human 4
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1742655.611957
I’m listening to In a Silent Way, the Miles Davis album that opened his electric period, but I’m not really listening. Also drawing my attention are reviews of all of his other albums, which I’m scanning as I contemplate which to listen to next. …
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1773098.611963
This paper examines the case for density matrix realism, as an approach to the fundamental ontology of our world. To date, there are two arguments that have been used to motivate density matrix realism. One is that we get a simpler metaphysics if we move from wave function realism to density matrix realism. The second is that density matrices are more general than wave functions, in allowing that the universe could be in a mixed state. To be convincing, these arguments can’t rest on the logical possibility that our universe could be in a mixed state.